After a frustrating day of tutoring and a worthless trip to the Neiman Marcus sale (they had nothing good marked down, and with their "luxury experience" dressing rooms of large size but questionable number, I waited in line for 35 minutes to try on a Diane Von Furstenburg dress that nearly brought me to tears in its unflattering-ness), I came home to make pizza. Seeing as how I was starving and there was a log of goat cheese and a pack of basil in my fridge, the idea of my apartment smelling like an Italian cafe was appealing. But no. No, I had to open the flour to discover weevils. Not ants, weevils.

Wikipedia tells me the following:

A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 mm (¼ inch), and herbivorous. Due to the shape of their heads, weevils are commonly known as snout beetles. There are over 60,000 species in several families, mostly in the family Curculionidae (the true weevils). Some other beetles, although not closely related, bear the name "weevil", such as the biscuit weevil (Stegobium paniceum), which belongs to the family Anobiidae.

Weevils are often found in dry foods including nuts and seeds, cereal and grain products. In the domestic setting, they are most likely to be observed when opening a bag of flour although they will happily infest most types of grain including oats, barley and breakfast cereals. If ingested, E. coli infection and other various diseases can be contracted from weevils, depending on their diet.

So, according to my internet research, if I had made pizza with this flour (I was deeply considering just removing the top layer and chucking the weevils down with the fishes), I would have gotten E. coli. That sounded swell and all, but I decided In N Out was a better option (animal style, no pickles, and fries well done, naturally).

I blew my week's free cash on these stainless canisters from Sur La Table. Gmail tells me that they will arrive in 7-10 days, and will keep my flour and sugar weevil-free.

I've been on a tremendous cooking spree recently. I think that this was ignited by the gift of a KitchenAid mixer (from my mom) for Christmas, but it was also catalyzed by countless trips to Williams-Sonoma, where I thought, "I should do that." "Should" is apparantly remarkably distinct from "have to," which is relegated to the realms of my research lab, where I "should" be characterizing tumor samples from my mouse model.

So, after my inspirations, I brought back several things from my parents house - things that actually were mine, but I never had any desire to own (my mother likes to purchase items for a life in which I do not live*). These include a full set of Le Creuset cookware in Williams-Sonoma Blue (several dutch ovens, a stock pot, and a grill pan), and other kitchen toys. Then, I proceeded to go on a bender that sent me home with springform pans, truffle oil, approximately 48 spices, and a new whisk.

This may or may not become an expensive hobby. One might think that once you own everything you need, cooking anything you desire should be a breeze. But the problem is, it's always something. It's always something you don't have - dutch process cocoa that apparently you can only purchase from Amazon, or meringue powder that is not sold in normal stores, or the goddamn truffle oil that is $30 a bottle but makes for amazing mac and cheese. I think that applies to life in general - it's always something.

* My mother really does not understand the life of a PhD student in the biomedical sciences. She seems to think that cooking a pan of lasagne, large enough to feed 27, is how I should spend my evenings, and not optimizing a quantitative real-time PCR reaction to amplify a gene that is expressed in my tissue at an excrutiatingly small level. She also thinks that I dress nicely every day, including heels, and get a decent amount of sleep. What she doesn't know is that wearing my Fryes instead of my Rainbows warrants celebration, and that I am hesitant to wear the entirely too expensive J. Crew wardrobe all the time instead of Joe's and a UCLA sweatshirt because odds are, I will spill bleach on it.